Beyond The Cliffs of Kerry by Amanda Hughes

Beyond the Cliffs of Kerry

By Amanda Hughes

Reviewed by Tarren Young

The writing of this book does not flow smoothly like any of the three main rivers of Ireland mentioned in the story, it is harsh and choppy. Perhaps this is done because of the environment Darcy McBride, the main character, lives in – and has had to live in since she was a young child, facing and surviving a famine in Ireland in the 1740’s. If Ms. Hughes chose to use choppy sentence structure for the time periods purpose, I could potentially understand, but I still feel that it doesn’t work and makes for a more difficult and less enjoyable read.

There are a few plot twists that I didn’t expect, which is cool, and I was getting into the romance part toward the end. (Literally, like page 320 or something.) Despite how uneven, sometimes awkward and clumsy the romance writing is, I do not appreciate how long it took me to get into the romance.

As a reader, I also don’t appreciate wasting my time on reading something that doesn’t draw me in right from the beginning. The story starts in Ireland but, other than a beating by her brother, there is no real action taking place until two years later – about 120 pages into the story. As a writer of mainly historical romance myself, I stuck with it to see what I could learn about the time period and the general character roles/thoughts/actions of the time.

I am also very disappointed with this story because it is written in third person and, although I typically don’t have a problem with third person, the author gives us what every character says and thinks. For example, in one paragraph we have Darcy’s point of view, then Nathan’s, then Jean-Michel, then another character. Sometimes it is within very short paragraphs in succession, so that we never really get to know the characters. We just have surface driven ambitions. This, to me as a reader, is very distracting and there are very little transitions at all in the story.

As both a reader and a writer, I understand that, considering the time frame of Darcy’s story, (it spans roughly five years of her life) and the scenarios she is thrown into, there is a need for a lot of characters. Darcy and her brother, her friends and family in Ireland, her best friend and her husband and all of their children, the Catholic Father they smuggle in, and the British military that is stationed there for a while (we learn all the top men’s names.) We hear of names from towns one or two over, we learn names from the ship she is on while being transported to the colonies and, of course, the people she meets in the colonies. Having to keep track of all the characters was a bit maddening. I honestly felt there were too many characters in this story and, if we heard ninety-percent of it from Darcy’s view only, then we wouldn’t have had the need for so many characters. She could have just called them the British guards or British Generals.

I am rating this story as 1.5 stars because this story could have been told in 150 pages instead of 390, and the writing feels more like a first draft than a final draft.